Hey everyone, Mainly what the title says. I had a bit of a butthole clenching moment today on the way home from my shop just now after putting two new tires on my bike. I always use a spray bottle with diluted Dawn dish detergent to lubricate the beads while installing the tires. This time was no different, but I had one of the beads on my front tire refuse to seat twice so I had to break the beads and reseat them - which led to me spraying a fair amount of the Dawn solution on the bead. Some of you can probably see where this is going at this point: while spraying the beads, some splatter / overspray / whatever got onto my brake rotors. I buttoned everything back up, cleaned my chain, and went on my merry way. .... Until I had to stop suddenly after a minivan pulled out in front of me, and realized I had very little braking power on either brake. I had to squeeze as hard as I could to stop from 35 mph, which I managed to do, but was rather scary while it was happening. Immediately after I got moving again, I realized what was up and tried to engage my rear ABS (which isn't hard on the XSR) and I couldn't despite mashing the brake pedal. A quick detour to the closest Advance Auto for some brake cleaner and 5 minutes in the parking lot rectified my issue. Needless to say, it would have been a whole lot easier and safer had I remembered to clean the rotors after seating the beads instead of what I actually did. Hopefully someone can learn from my stupid mistake and save themselves some trouble! PS: as a guy who is coming from always running supersport tires, sport touring tires comparatively suck ass to mount / demount. If you are planning to do them, a third spoon and rim guard along with a buddy to help out (or a tire machine) is pretty much mandatory. Thank you!
